More specifically, although not exclusively, the rear landing gear according to the invention is intended to be mounted on jumbo jet aircraft, such as civilian airplanes capable of carrying a high payload (in terms of passengers and/or freight) or military airplanes such as bombers or refueling, troop transport and/or equipment transport airplanes.
It is known that the landing gear, particularly the rear landing gear, of these present or future jumbo jet airplanes (such as those with twin fuselages positioned in parallel) are equipped with several wheels arranged in single tandem or double tandem, them forming a bogie, in order to support the substantial weight of these airplanes and, in the case of military airplanes, to free up space under the fuselage for carrying weaponry.
However, the use of these tandem landing gears takes away the ability of the airplane to pivot about the tandem wheels at the time of take-off (by contrast with landing gears having one or two wheels twinned as in the form of a diabolo on one and the same axle), thus increasing the take-off distance of the airplane and therefore entailing longer runways.
Hence, to shorten this distance, there are a number of solutions that have already been proposed, including the solution whereby the angle of attack of the wing structure is increased in order to promote lift on the airplane as soon as the latter acquires speed during the take-off phase. However, a fixed wing structure with a high angle of attack leads, in flight, to considerable drag, which means that this solution is not widely used.
Another solution is to have the wheels of the front landing gear at a larger diameter than the wheels of the rear landing gear, so as to incline the fuselage and therefore the wing structure with respect to the relative airflow when taxiing along the ground during the take-off phase. The airplane thus has a nose-up trim and the angle of attack of the wing structure is increased. Nonetheless, during the phases of boarding and taxiing along the ground, the fuselage is not horizontal, and this is not desirable particularly for transporting passengers. Further, the large-diameter wheels of the front landing gear take up too much space under the fuselage and entail additional weight.